I have some fun homeschool music curriculum today. Also, look at Fun Facts About the Phantom of the Opera & Styles of Music Unit Study.
Teaching the basics of how to play a big wooden box like the piano may seem.
Perhaps if you compared it to building an appreciation for the love of classical music in your children.
Too, Tiny has spent more years with a piano teacher receiving instruction than I have nurturing his appreciation for classical music.
So, I was ecstatic about receiving Zeezok Music Appreciation for the Elementary Grades Book 1.
Music Appreciation in a Box
First, this is a comprehensive music curriculum.
But take a peek at what we got in our Music Appreciation for the Elementary Grades Book 1 Collection.
- One Student Activity Book, 353 pages.
- Music Discs. Psst. . . It’s 2+ hours of beautiful professionally recorded music.
- Lapbook Disc – 7 lapbooks. One on each composer.
- 7 composer biographies. One biography on each composer studied which are Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Paganini and Schubert.
Right away I want to tell you that though I have had several months reviewing this curriculum.
And we have just barely touched the scope of it. We didn’t want to miss any tidbit shared throughout the student activity book. So we have taken our time going through it.
Poring over every fact about each composer, and the historical background of them, we have spent many days cuddled in the living room.
We have read and did hands-on activities for Bach, Handel and some on Haydn.
It is an in-depth study on music styles. In addition, it includes learning how music is created.
Also, it so much more. For example, it has geography, history, hands-on activities, quizzes, an instrument study and character trait studies.
I know what that is – a unit study!
Because we wanted to add this to our French Revolution unit study that we started after using the curriculum, we moved ahead to focus on the study of Beethoven because his life overlapped the French Revolution.
For instance look at the part of the student activity book that focuses on Beethoven.
You see how each section in the student activity book is designed.
All excellent unit studies start with a plan.
And the plan is built right into the student activity book. Above you can see the weekly lesson outline showing the 4 week plan.
To study each composer there is allotted 4 weeks. I love the Weekly Lesson Outline.
The lesson planning direction is superior.
Music Appreciation in a Box
So, I would rather see the outline and determine the pace for my children, than not have a beginning point. You have a beginning point and activities lined out for each of the 7 composers.
The weekly lesson plan of activities is built into the student activity book.
This allowed me to give Tiny more control over what he did each day.
Now that he is getting older, I want him to take more responsibility for some of his day.
So I was able to use this feature as a way to measure his maturity for more accountability and for him to start his day on his own without my prompting.
Also though the student activity book is an all in one resource. It has everything you need in it to complete the series after you read each chapter in the biography reader each week.
If you are short on shelf space, you will like the fact that it is the teacher’s guide, student activity book, has tidbits of interest, assigns the music to listen to, gives timelines, has instructions for lessons on hands-on projects, has a quiz and the answers at the end of each unit.
All of these things made it easy for Tiny to pick up and start on his own.
Moving on to the actual contents of each week’s lesson, they are varied. We especially took notice of the activities and background information for history and geography.
For example, we enjoyed learning that during the 1800’s songs were written in response to social events.
Homeschool Music Curriculum
This is exactly the tie in I was looking for in this curriculum to help Tiny understand how music evokes passion and emotions on sensitive social issues.
Regarding geography, the introduction to the Rhine River was a chance to pull out our atlases to understand the world of Beethoven as he knew it from the time he was a boy to a famous composer.
Also, including lessons on the character qualities of Beethoven and tying that into a language arts lesson made studying this part more meaningful for Tiny.
He loved doing the attribute acronym for his name as he was inspired by the motivating force of adjectives.
I know I have been sharing about the student activity book because comprehensive hardly seems accurate enough to describe it, but the other important element to this curriculum that equally stirred us beyond the music and activity book were the composer biographies.
I have seen these Great Musician Series Readers on some of the online homeschool book stores before and knew they were classical readers, but wasn’t quite sure how to use them in my day because I don’t have a musical background.
The classical readers remind me of a living history book too because even though they are biographies they do a beautiful job of weaving the background information as you read about the lives of each musician.
The readers have black and white simple, but treasured pictures along with the famous music of each composer in them.
Tiny spent hours at the piano trying to mimic Beethoven after reading about him and some of the other composers each week.
As if all of this wasn’t enough to send us over the top about this curriculum, we could hardly wait to get started on the lapbook too about Beethhoven.
Music Composer Lapbooks
The lapbooks are on a separate cd which made it nice because I could just print off each week what we wanted to do that day.
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The cd does have pictures of the lapbook on each composer along with helpful instructions as you prepare each one.
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{The Chiming Tower Bells were used in the biography about Ludwig Beethoven to tell about his favorite things and it was one of Tiny’s favorite minibooks.}
So I was thrilled when I saw the color minibooks and the fact they contained information to teach your child.
In other words, most of them had information to glue in the inside instead of giving your child tons of blank, useless pages.
Sure there are minibooks for him to write in, but again the emphasis on an interactive hands-on tool should be about absorbing the information and not about always having to color, craft or cut.
The lapbook is just one of the many hands-on activities found through out the course.
Too, there are more than enough activities to choose from whether your child is younger or older.
For example, we left out one minibook that asked Tiny what some of his favorite things were. It was just too young for him. So I liked the fact that there were plenty of activities to choose from for every age.
I am putting the rest of my posts I did on this curriculum at the bottom of this one so you can read about them too.
Hands–On Music Ideas
Not having a music background, but wanting my sons to keep pursuing their love of it, I give Music Appreciation for the Elementary Grades Book 1 a huge two thumbs up.
If you have serious musicians in your family, you will appreciate too the scope and sequence found in the beginning of the student activity book showing music appreciation and music theory standards.
Product Name: Music Appreciation for the Elementary Grades Book
Count the cost by remembering that this includes geography, history, music vocabulary, hands-on ideas, timelines and character trait studies. It is a two year study to complete all the hands-on activities, 7 lapbooks, listen to all the beautiful pieces and complete the whole student activity book
Type of Product: Physical student book which is approximately 353 pages. { It is recommended that each child have their own activity book.} Music CDS, Lapbook CD and 7 biographies.
Each reader averages from approximately 118 pages for the shortest reader to approximately 166 pages for the longer book. All of the books include notorious and famous music pieces.
Grades: K – 6th.
{But there are things in the music and knowledge of the composers’ background that I feel a junior high or budding new musician in high school would benefit from because of the depth of music theory. Certainly not babyish.}
See more about Zeezok Music Curriculum in the posts below!
